DVD review: Twilight ***

Vampires have always been popular with the movie-going public – since 1922’s Nosferatu there have been over 200 films made about Dracula alone - and it seems this fascination with bloodsuckers won’t end anytime soon.

Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight books are staggeringly successful, topping the New York Times Best Sellers List. It focuses on the more romantic aspects of the genre, so it’s less blood spurting and throat biting and more eternal forbidden love.

Bella (Kristen Stewart) is the new girl in town, sent to an isolated rural community to live with her father. She has no problems fitting in with the other students who are upbeat and happy but becomes fascinated by the one boy they can’t quite figure out; Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson) of the Cullen family, who keep themselves to themselves.

Initially aloof and brooding, Edward is drawn to Bella and they begin a budding romance but after saving her from certain death from a runaway truck he is forced to reveal to her what he is. His family, he explains, are ‘vegetarian’ vampires who don’t feed on humans but there are others which do.

It’s a predictable storyline, you can see their romance coming a mile away, but the pacing for the first half of the film is excellent. Pattinson is fantastic as the alabaster-skinned Cullen; wonderfully handsome and brooding with Byronic anguish and their developing romance is beautifully shot through snow covered trees and mountain ranges. Teenage girls all over the world will melt in their seats.

Where it starts to go a bit wrong is the second half. It’s a much better film when it’s exploring the uneasy developing romance between Bella and Edward. When it tries to become a pseudo-action movie, it starts to trip over itself. The special effects aren’t good enough to portray the vampires’ speed and it puts you in mind of the stop-start motion of the Six Million Dollar Man.

And Bella and Edward seem to fall in love rather quickly. One moment it’s smouldering looks from across the car park, the next it’s Bella lamenting “I’d rather die than stay away from you!” It’s all a bit melodramatic but par for the course of any teenage romance.

And what’s the moral here? Edward struggling with his simultaneous desire to make love to Bella and to kill her could be read as a thinly disguised endorsement for teenage abstinence. In fact, if there weren’t any vampires in it, it would just be story about forbidden teenage love.

But despite these minor gripes, if you watch it with your romantic teenager hat on, it’s a wonderfully enjoyable vampire film. It’s certainly not perfect but I must confess it melted even my cynical black heart and that’s got to count for something.

Twilight (PG) is out on DVD now.